murraybramwell.com

January 01, 1994

Open G

Filed under: Archive,Music

1994

Graham Parker
The Office

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

When, in 1975, he sent a demo tape into Charlie Gillett’s show on Radio London, an unknown service station worker named Graham Parker helped jump-start English music. Weary with disco and reeling from lugubrious concept albums, listeners were suddenly swept by a New Wave. Short songs with sharp lyrics and pumped up rhythm were back. Power pop somebody called it, others called it punk. Whatever it was, it unleashed a burst of new talent which threatened to outflank the British invasion of a decade earlier.

Out of the ruck -and beyond the publicity aura of Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols – came bands like The Clash and the Police. And, also- the Auden, Spender and MacNeish of their generation- Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson and Graham Parker. Each has gained enduring distinction. Costello as a prolific and uncompromising composer and performer, Jackson as a jiver turned piano crooner and Parker as a songwriter with a legendary band who kept on producing great albums which nobody much got around to buying.

Performing solo for a series of Australian concerts, Graham Parker is promoting his latest CD, 12 Haunted Episodes. It has songs for older people, he remarks drily, people who have babysitters. He confides to the diehards gathered at the Office that he has been listening to the Seattle grunge sound and made the discovery that all the songs are in open G tuning. So I’ve got with this idea, he drawls with sarcastic London adenoids- “in a David Blue-Donovan-James Taylor kind of way.”

Those who saw Parker lead the Rumour through two hypermanic tours in 1978 and 1979 will know what he means by heat treatment. But even when he was squeezing out the sparks his music never lacked nuance- as tracks like You Can’t Be Too Strong eloquently indicated. And with the live acoustic album, Alone in America, GP also anticipated, by several years, the current fad for things unplugged. So, up on stage -with a sunburst acoustic Maton, a harmonica and Seattle open tuning- Graham Parker never looked or sounded better. Or more himself.

He’s still a scrawny little ectomorph and we still don’t know for sure that he owns a pair of eyeballs, but at least these days the lenses in his trademark aviators are rose-coloured. He opens the set with Watch the Moon Come Down, then, from Mona Lisa’s Sister, a soulful version of Back in Time. A quick plug for the new album- “it’s still pretty good stuff” – and he sings its crappiest track, Pollinate. Force of Nature works considerably better, as does the title song , even with some Van Morrison dit-dit-didits between stanzas. Then he mixes it around again, Success, a catchy tune from Mona Lisa, and a dreamy reading of Temporary Beauty, confidently and winningly performed, ballad in plain G.

He makes a joke about the song being turned into elevator music and goes up the escalator for a sweetly edged version of Love Without Greed and another new one, See Yourself. By now Parker is enjoying the space and he unwinds into a lengthy anecdote about pranging his Lancia on an English motorway. It is a pub rocker’s confession, a droll account of fly-boy hubris. Or, as he puts it -“a yob song about getting slashed.” The song never made it on to Squeezing Out Sparks. Instead, it went to Dave Edmunds and Parker reclaims it with relish. Crawling From the Wreckage. A song of insentience becomes a song of experience.

Things are going nicely and Parker is now open to suggestion. He calls for requests. Various titles are called out . Someone behind me wants Cupid. I hear this croaky voice yell out Protection and realise it’s mine. What was that song -I’m not crying for attention, I’m screaming to be heard ? Well, damn it anyway. I can’t manage to project over all those others who want White Honey.

He plays eleven requests. All sorts. Gypsy Blood, Hotel Chambermaid, Between You and Me -the demo that started it all. Howling Wind. Love Gets You Twisted- slowed down and metaphysical, the reggae inflections of Start a Fire and, one from The Real Macaw, Can’t Take Love For Granted.

Others get a go, but no votes for Protection. I’m temporarily exhilarated by Don’t Let it Break You Down mutating into the old Who song, Substitute. It is both sardonic and elegiac, smart but full of feeling. And, chimes before twelve, Parker vamps his way through Discovering Japan- “my watch says 8.02 but that’s midnight to you.” Scheduled to play for an hour Parker has stretched it to more than two. More chunky chords and he’s away again. It’s only a bit of electric strum but you can hear the ghostly chords of the Rumour – Brinsley Schwartz’s electric glide, Goulding and Bodnar, the symbiotic rhythm section, Bob Andrews on keyboard. Just can’t get, just can’t get, just can’t get no… Protection. Is there a better hymn to paranoia than this three minute marvel ? Kafka and Marcuse. Beckett on speed. “It’s not the knife through the heart that tears you apart,/ It’s just the thought of someone sticking it in.”

Graham Parker plays several encores – an even more grown-up version of You Can’t Be Too Strong and, his anthem from the no future days, Don’t Ask Me Questions (there ain’t no answers in me). Hearing him perform so engagingly from across maybe a dozen albums I’m not sure he can pull that one on us. In an era when the erstwhile trade on nostalgia and the has-beens run on self pity, Parker is, as ever, his own man- self-possessed, inventive, articulate, funny. He has written three or four dozen first rate songs and he still has his own teeth. I’d say that’s some kind of answer. And he knows the secrets of open tuning.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published.

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